Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As data center professionals plan for 2026 and beyond, it’s important to understand and consider the trends shaping the industry.

In many organizations, ITSM tools and data center infrastructure tools operate in separate silos, leading to incomplete records and limited visibility. CMDB records are often incomplete or out of date because updates rely on manual entry, while incidents, changes, and service requests in ITSM lack full visibility into the physical infrastructure. Integrating DCIM with ITSM closes this gap, ensuring CMDB data matches reality and linking service workflows to accurate, actionable information.

The pace of change in data center operations shows no sign of slowing, and 2026 is shaping up to be another year of rapid evolution. AI-driven demand is accelerating, hybrid architectures are growing more complex, and capacity constraints are forcing teams to rethink how they plan and operate their environments. Against this backdrop, data center professionals are reassessing the tools, processes, and strategies they rely on every day.

Outages are less common than they once were, but when they happen, the impact is severe. According to the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2025, half of data center operators reported at least one impactful outage in the past three years, and one in ten of those caused a serious or severe disruption. The financial risk is just as significant. 20% of operators said their most recent outage cost more than $1 million when accounting for downtime, recovery, and reputational damage.

Data center vacancy rates in North America have hit record lows, with reports from CBRE and JLL indicating figures between 1.6% and 2.3% as of mid-2025. This is driven by exceptionally high demand from hyperscale and AI users, which is outstripping supply and leading to significant competition for space and power. The tight market is expected to continue through at least 2027, with preleasing of new construction at high levels.

A Building Management System (BMS) is commonly used in data centers to monitor and control the facility’s mechanical, electrical, and environmental systems. With a BMS in place, it’s reasonable to ask: do you still need Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software? The short answer is yes—DCIM and BMS serve occasionally overlapping but fundamentally different purposes.

When you don’t have reliable processes for managing IT assets, you can quickly lose control. Asset inventories lose their accuracy, data across tools like CMDBs and spreadsheets stops matching reality, and no one can say with confidence what equipment is in use, where it’s located, how it’s connected, and whether it’s still needed. For data center professionals, a lack of asset visibility creates real risks.

Modern data centers depend on multiple teams, each using their own systems—CMDBs, ticketing platforms, cloud and virtualization tools, network and server management software, observability stacks, collaboration apps, and countless spreadsheets. Each tool provides important insights, but together they create a complex and sprawling technology landscape.

Uptime Institute’s 2025 Global Data Center Survey shows that capacity planning remains a top challenge for operators. Nearly one-third of vendors identify forecasting future capacity requirements as their customers’ single biggest issue, more than any other concern. Modern data centers face new complexities as digital services expand and hybrid IT architectures shift workloads across on-premises, colocation, and cloud environments.

As colocation demand surges, space is becoming increasingly scarce and costly. According to CBRE, the average asking rate in primary wholesale colocation markets for a 250–500 kW requirement has climbed 12.6% year-over-year to a record $184.06 per kW/month, while vacancy rates have dropped to a record-low 1.9%. With vacancy rates low and power costs rising, doing more with less in your data center is essential.